A graduate of the Lyon and Paris fine arts schools, Agnès Geoffray has undertaken residencies at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam from 2002 to 2003 and at the Villa Medici in Rome in 2010. Working at the intersection of photography and installation, using both still and moving images, as well as texts, projections, objects and performances, her work unfolds as a multiplicity of experiences that challenge image and language. They are challenging because of the questions they ask about the ways in which we respond to constraint – physical, mental, pollical, social – and overcome it, physically and linguistically. The work exists in a suspended state, in the folds and seams between word and image, two tools that the artist indiscriminately deploys to describe bodies, gestures, postures and language. And yet language is not neutral, and so A. Geoffray also shows its violence, and the violence of history on bodies and words, which are torn from their contexts. How can we silently stand up to oblivion? How might we forge a link between word and image? Between language and the body? These are the questions that A. Geoffray is concerned with. They converge in different series such as Pièces à conviction and Les Messagers, in which writing and photography together cast light on what remains unsaid about history, political constraint and power. The works turn on a poetic gesture of reversal, and it is the gesture that speaks.

A. Geoffray collects and then manipulates images, anonymous or otherwise, retouching or reconceiving them by recontextualizing them, staging them alongside words borrowed or self-penned. In all cases, it is the hand that makes the links. Thus, we consider the hand’s intelligence, its poetic power and its capacity for resistance. The hand is both tool and weapon, Aristotle wrote. It makes and breaks, traces, writes, measures, and tests, as we see in the series Les Impassibles (2018). It is the hand that allows us to move from place to place, era to era in the artist’s atemporal universe, in a sort of transversal history. The hand is also an organ of sensation. It appears in several projects, figurative or suggested. In Les Élégantes (2018) for example, we come across it as a series of black gloves – empty, lain out envelopes for absent hands – with words punched in them urging action, awaiting gestures.

In her series Incidental Gestures (2011), A. Geoffray finds an opportunity to rehabilitate archival images through displacement. Drawing inspiration from the doctored photographs used by totalitarian regimes, the artist restores dignity to the figures of victims, or, inversely, renders the banal disturbing. The work consists in this metamorphosis, this shift. Indeed, throughout her work, A. Geoffray captures precisely the moment before the shift. Suspending the inevitable allows for the emergence of an alternate outcome, so she may modify the final moments of the gesture or fix an incomplete one. Halfway between descent and ascent, bodies that appear caught in ambivalent postures or in the midst of making unidentifiable actions allow no definitive conclusion to be drawn. The work stands against the closed discourse of the visible and, in its commitment to discontinuity, grapples with violence and tension, leaving us in what the artist calls a state of “catastrophic suspense”.

A. Geoffray’s work has been shown in France and internationally. It can be found in numerous collections, including Paris’s Pompidou Centre (MNAM) and Musée de l’Élysée, the Fondation Antoine de Galbert and the Neuflize OBC collection, the MAC VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine and the FRAC Auvergne in Clermont-Ferrand.